Heidegger and the Global Age

Antonio Cerella, Louiza Odysseos, Antonio Cerella, Louiza Odysseos

• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781786602305
• eBook ISBN: 9781786602329
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Critical Theory

Globalization is one of the most contested and (ab)used concepts of our time. Whether one interprets it as a 'collective illusion' or as the final stage of capitalism, as 'uncontrollable multitude' or as a radical opening of new spaces of freedom, the 'global age' represents the conceptual and existential background of our being-in-the-world. But what lies behind this process? What mode of human existence is brought about by the age of technology and 'global mobilization'? And is it possible to attempt a unitary interpretation of this age that presents itself as both total and pluralistic?

This volume rethinks these epochal questions in light of Martin Heidegger's complex hermeneutics, proposing at the same time that such questions enable the interrogation of some of its most fundamental aspects: the metanarrative of Seinsgeschichte as withdrawal of Being; the structure of human existence within the frame of technology; the relation between humanism and nihilism, as well as politics and technology; the changing character of subjectivity in the 'age of the world picture'; the mythopoeic force of art and the uprooting of human beings. As this volume shows, interrogating Heidegger's thought has significant potential for both International Political Theory and also the analysis of specific concepts and dynamics in contemporary international studies, such as the changing character of spatiality, temporality, and subjectivity

Part I

INSIDE THE GLOBAL: ENFRAMINGS

Chapter 1

Devastation

Michael Marder

THE ONTOLOGICAL DEVASTATION – OF ONTOLOGY

What do we do when we devastate the world? What does devastation do? What has it done, and what does it keep doing to ‘us’ and through ‘us’, the devastated devastators? And is there still anything untouched outside the scope of its implacable force?

It is exceptionally difficult to raise, let alone to address, these questions because their referent is so vast as to be nearly unthinkable. They overlap with the question concerning the meaning of being adjusted to the historical ontology of the twenty-first century when not only are beings devastated but also, crucially, being is devastation. In a dialogue that bears a telling signature date, 8 May 1945, Heidegger registers a similar insight: ‘The being of an age of devastation would … consist precisely in the abandonment of being [Das Sein eines Zeitalters der Verwüstung bestünde … gerade in der Seinsverlassenheit]’.¹ We will undoubtedly return to the ‘abandonment of being’, Seinsverlassenheit, that encompasses the being we abandon and the being that leaves us behind (or ahead). Ignoring these ostensibly negligible semantic nuances would be unforgivable, seeing that an effective response to devastation depends on how its meaning, entwined with the meaning of being, resonates with us. But one thing is clear: the ambiguities of abandonment notwithstanding, contemporary being – though this ‘contemporaneity’ is nothing new; it ‘has not existed just since yesterday’² and might be as old as Western metaphysics – is the devastation of being, rather than being’s withdrawal.

In everyday speech, devastation is usually synonymous with destruction, yet, Heidegger insists, it is ‘more than destruction’.

Devastation is more uncanny than negation [Verwüstung ist mehr als Zerstörung. Verwüstung ist unheimlicher als Vernichtung]. Destruction only sweeps aside all that has grown up or been built up so far; but devastation blocks all future growth and prevents all building. Devastation is more unearthly than mere destruction. Mere destruction sweeps aside all things including even nothingness, while devastation on the contrary establishes and spreads [bestellet und ausbreitet] everything that blocks and prevents.³

The more of devastation, distinguishing it from destruction and negation, is the surplus of positivity ingrained into its capacity to establish and spread its worldlessness on the face of the earth, to create a reality of its own, however de-realizing. It is this surplus of positivity over destruction and negation that empowers devastation to step into the shoes of being and to become ensconced at the heart of fundamental ontology.

Militating against the dwelling, which consists in building and cultivation, devastation signals a growing impossibility of growing and a build-up of homelessness. In contrast to destruction that destroys housing, devastation devastates dwelling, striking not at the actual but at the possible, including the very possibility of actuality. Devastation, Verwüstung, is a growing force, a growth, the spread of a desert, Wüste, where nothing grows – which means that being is desertification, the ever-expanding desert – vast, unoccupied, desolate, vacant, vacated of beings. Being ‘as such and as a whole’ is en route to becoming a wasteland.

Let us take a step back. Have we not just now defined the ontological by the ontic, being as such by a geographical phenomenon and so have committed a cardinal sin against Heidegger’s philosophical position? We have, and, in this, we are justified by the fact that, together with the difference between earth and world expunged thanks to the spreading worldlessness, ontico-ontological difference has already collapsed due to the workings of devastation. ‘ “Devastation” [“Verwüstung”] means for us, after all, that everything – the world, the human, and the earth – will be transformed into a desert [Wüste]’.⁴ Another way of saying this is that everything will be made so vast that all determinate outlines will be ontically lost and that all differences will be ontologically erased on the wind-swept surfaces of the wasteland, the wasteworld and human waste, which we are incessantly producing and which we have become. Globalization (cultural, economic, political) is but a sideshow to such devastating vastness.

From the Late Latin devastatio, ‘devastation’ is perhaps more telling than Verwüstung as far as the implosion of ontico-ontological difference is concerned. A speculative word par excellence in the Hegelian tradition, devastation negates the vast all the while affirming and, as we have seen, propagating vastness. It can do both things at once because its uncanny force parasitically binds itself to the site of existence (is there, can there be any other kind of site?), which is Dasein, marking the difference between being and beings. Installed there, in the place of existence, devastation widens the ontico-ontological difference up to the point where its distended outlines morph into indifference, the ensuing vastness exceeding every limit. That devastation can be ‘established’ or ‘installed’, emulating the act of commencement, shows how it occupies the terrain that used to be reserved for fundamental ontology.

With the younger interlocutor for his mouthpiece, Heidegger intimates in ‘The Evening Conversation’ included in Feldweg-Gespräche 1944–5 that something escapes the force of devastation in the forest, in ‘the capacious, which prevails in the expanse [das Geräumige, das in der Weite waltot]’.⁵ The capacious makes room for existence, whereas the vast pertains to space, an uninhabited and uninhabitable abstraction. The former receives beings and yet refrains from violating their singularity; the latter is hermetically closed off in its enormous extension, unless we consider the way the desert, akin to a black hole, ‘draws in’ and ‘integrates’ (einbeziehen) everything even as it spreads outwards.⁶ What is propitious for existence is not the vastness of the desert that suffocates with its very infinity, but the ‘open, yet veiled expanse [offenen und doch verhüllten Weite]’⁷ of the forest. Another ontic geographical reality, the forest regulates ontico-ontological difference, this time not hollowing it out but potentiating and investing it with meaning, whereas deforestation, in a spiralling cause and effect of desertification, spells out the ontic loss of habitat and the ontological erosion of dwelling.

The open closure or the enclosed opening of the forest invites existence into itself in the mode of delimitation. The limits it sets have nothing to do with the transcendental conditions of possibility for having any experience, and everything to do with the phenomenality of finite beings that give and withhold themselves, as well as their being, in their self-presentation. Embodying the vastness of devastation, the desert eliminates the limits that enable the appearing of what appears. Hence, its absolutely open expanse coincides with absolute closure.

There needs to be just the right mix of the open and the veiled for beings to flourish in and to have access to their worlds. Heidegger’s word for this mix, for this precarious proportion, is ‘clearing’, Lichtung. An arena of being and understanding, the clearing is an opening in the forest: a rarified site among the trees surrounded by the density of matter, of wood or the woods, that is of what the Greeks called hylē. The strategy of deforestation, desertification, or devastation, which in the end amount to one and the same thing, is to clear the clearing by removing the opacity around its veiled opening. None of the three processes comes to rest until the dense vegetal-material, wooden frame of the clearing – the frame that stands for the being-limit of every limit – has been undone. To paraphrase Heidegger, destruction destroys that which is framed; devastation strikes at the frame. As the frame vanishes from sight, the framed disappears and is present everywhere. The desert is this unframed unframing, the historical culmination of aspirations towards total translucence, shared by the Gnostic fight against the evilness of matter and the (pre-critical, pre-Kantian, to be sure) Enlightenment dream of inaugurating the unbounded reign of reason.

Devastation, the younger interlocutor in the dialogue concludes, ‘is driven unconditionally [unbedingt zu betreiben]’.⁸ It proceeds in the name of the unconditional, demolishing all delimitations that crop up as so many obstacles on its path. Unconditionally, devastation de- or un-conditions what could still demonstrate itself in the clearing, not to mention the existential-phenomenological conditions for demonstrating anything. Besides the frame, or along with it, devastation devastates the in-between where every dwelling is situated, das Inzwischen, before the latter is formalized into a difference. To be precise, devastation adjusts the in-between for the epoch of global errancy, when the earth becomes ‘an errant star’, or else ‘a mad star’, Irrstern, ‘which, straying between planetary devastation and the concealment of the beginning, bears the in-between, which is the abyss [die zwischen der planetarischen Verwüstung und der Verbergung des Anfangs irrend das Inzwischen trägt, das der Abgrund ist]’.⁹

A ray of hope shines in these lines, even if the light itself emanates from the black sun of melancholia. Although there is no more place for the in-between on the vast plains devastation exposes and leaves behind – although there is no more place for place, a difference gapes between everything thrust open, exposed, unsheltered by devastation and the concealed beginning, the event of another growth. Instead of the veiled expanse of the forest, we witness an intensifying polarization between the translucent openness of the devastated, desertified planet, on the one hand, and the complete withdrawal, the self-veiling of the beginning, on the other. Things are further complicated once we are reminded that much of Heidegger’s thinking around devastation responds to a line from Nietzsche’s Zarathustra: ‘The desert grows: woe to the one who harbors deserts! [Die Wüste wächst: weh Dem, der Wüsten birgt!]’¹⁰ The concealment (Verbergung) of the beginning might be nothing but the deserts harboured (birgt) within Dasein in the aftermath of the devastation of ontico-ontological difference. The event of another growth would, in that case, culminate in the deserts growing within and outside us.

With this, we cross the second positive threshold of ontological devastation, namely its affinity to the emergence out of itself and overall growth of the Greek physis, rendered in Latin as natura. The first threshold referred to how the vastness of devastation parasitically occupied the site of existence and ontico-ontological difference, distending them to the point of making their finitude implode into the limitless. Having let devastation into Dasein, having allowed that which does not let anything into itself inhabit the place of existence, the human is expelled outside itself and turns into ‘the satellite [Trabant] of the devastation’.¹¹ That is the moment of devastation’s Bestellung, its establishment within the in-between of fundamental ontology. But, as we know, devastation also spreads (ausbreitet) in a surplus of positivity over mere destruction and negation. Its spreading out is equally parasitic, considering that it usurps the tendency of physis, which for Heidegger is the ancient Greek word for being. In this sense, as well, being is a growing devastation, which is to say, the expansion of deserts, of placeless space, of desolate vastness.

‘The desert grows’: Heidegger hears Nietzsche’s expression with an ear for literalness. A thing ‘in’ physis, the desert takes upon itself the activity of physis as a whole: to grow, to emerge out of itself. Supplanting the figure of a plant that has served as the traditional synecdoche for self-emergent growth, the desert, clear of vegetal traces, now blossoms into the flower of devastating nihilism. The ‘abandonment of life’ in devastation ‘allows for nothing that emerges [aufgeht] of itself, in its emergence unfolds itself, and in unfolding calls others into a co-emerging [Mitafugehen]’.¹² But devastation does not simply proscribe emergence and unfolding; it is not just a negative ‘event [Ereignis] through which any and all possibilities for something essential to arise and to bloom [aufgehe und erblühe] in its dominion are suffocated at the root’.¹³ The event of devastation arises and blooms from the suffocated root of blooming and arising, which is why the desert can grow and which is why that event itself may be described as ‘far-reaching’, or ‘extending its grasp’, vorausgreifende.¹⁴ The bifurcated root it suffocates, growing out of and thanks to that very suffocation, is (1) the fertile earth as the fourfold of the entire elemental domain conducive to life and (2) the finite opening of Dasein, the clearing, the space-time of ontico-ontological difference. All that remains is mounting sand, yet to be thought through philosophically.

DEVASTATION AND DISARTICULATION

As he muses about the meaning of the desert, the older interlocutor in ‘The Evening Conversation’ points to sand in passing only to dismiss the idea that a ‘waterless sandy plain’ exhausts the meaning sought after. A profound sense of the desert, according to him, is to be found in ‘the immeasurable surface as ...

Table of contents

• Acknowledgements
• List of Contributors
• Editors’ Note
• Introduction: De-Framing the Global
• PART I: INSIDE THE GLOBAL: ENFRAMINGS
• PART II: ACROSS THE GLOBAL: INFLUENCES
• PART III: OUTSIDE THE GLOBAL: CROSSINGS
• Index